Sicily, July-August 2023

In the weeks preceding our departure to Sicily, Europe was in the grip of a heatwave. A few days before, the news made it look like the whole of Sicily was on fire, including our destination airport, Catania (officially caused by a printer cable, but presumably doused in something more flammable by a local heavy who had a ready-written proposal for a new airport). With no information about whether we'd be able to get there, we caught the plane from Leeds to Amsterdam anyway, speculating that if we got that far, they'd be keen to send us on somewhere else. On arrival, nobody knew anything about our flight, yet it did strangely have a departure gate, just not to the right airport. Without boarding cards, we stood hopefully at the gate with a plane's worth of other passengers, also without boarding cards, and somehow we all ended up on the plane to... Palermo, on the other side of the island.

As we descended into Palermo, the pilot suggested we looked out of the window. Entire hillsides ablaze, we felt like we were being delivered to a disaster zone from which there may be no escape. Stepping out into the warm summer night, quite late, we paid a huge excess to pick up the already hideously expensive hire car from the wrong place, and set off on the long trip across the island. It was a surreal journey, passing countless intense wildfires, sometimes on the side of the road or even in the central reservation, but luckily with little traffic (was there something we hadn't been told?), the closest ones were easily dodged. We arrived at our first destination, Lido di Noto, at 0300 hours, our hosts sweetly having waited up to greet us, enthusiastically showing us around the outdoor kitchen stocked with pasta, tomato sauce, salted capers, and homemade olive oil. Breakfast was strange Italian biscuits and the hosts' own almond milk (surprisingly nice, though in this kind of heat any liquid is).

For the remainder of the holiday, as the fires died down, the main perils were a crash course (nearly) in Italian-style driving, and the intense heat.

26-28th July - Siracusa and Ragusa

29-31st July - Agrigento and Enna

31st July - 2nd August - Catania

3-6th August - Catania